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Elon Musk launches encyclopedia ‘fact-checked’ by AI and aligning with rightwing views
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2025
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While that is idealy true, the reality of maintaining an ecyclopedia is not always so black and white.
For example, Wikipedia needs to make decisions like whether to call Scientology a religion or a cult, or whether to call homeopathy medicin or pseudo-science. These are value judgements based on criticism to the subject matter and are not fully objective. But they are still important to allow people to get a full picture on a topic.
The alternative would be to relegate criticism on a topic to the criticism section, which runs the risks of giving certain ideas a false sense of legitimacy.
If I had to make a guess, part of the reason why Musk has such an issue with Wikipedia is because they actually have the policy to name criticism up front.
We have a set of criteria for what constitutes a cult, and scientology is unequivocally a cult. If there's any debate, it's from the church trying to deny the fact.
Likewise, we also have the scientific method that disproves the health claims regularly made by homeopathy practicioners.
Whether to called homeopathy medicine or pseudoscience is absolutely NOT a value judgement
pseudo science is too kind. Unscientific is more accurate.
I don't know the difference between cults and religions. They both worship weird shit and bullshit stories.
If it doesnt have to pay taxes its a religion i think
That's a very country centric definition
It would make a belief system a religion on one country and a cult in another
No offense, but your examples of Wikipedia's "Grey area" absolutley pales in comparison to an entire grokipedia that presents absolutely no counter points whatsoever.
If the choice is between:
Or
Then the choice is very much black or white in deciding which is better to use.
I'm not even remotely saying you should use Grokipedia over Wikipedia. I kind of assumed that would be a given, considering the other things I said.
I'm merely pointing out that an encyclopedia isn't just stating dry facts, and that there is certain editorial decisions that need to be made when presenting information.
That does not mean I'm saying Wikipedia is bad and shouldn't be used.
Edit: typo
Thank you for the clarification. This phrasing of yours:
Is almost identical in nature to every bad faith argument used in the last two decades to dismantle public infrastructure in America.
Namely, you say Wikipedia's goal of factual clarity is an ideal that doesn't exist, and then go on to amplify a small problem (factual disagreement) as the reason it's "not always so black and white."
While your point is about encyclopedias in general, that seems buried by your choice of how to phrase that point.
No offense intended by me pointing this out. As you did absolutely clarify at the end of your statement that people should still use Wikipedia.
It's just that the phrasing you used is almost identical to MAGA and how they talk about Wikipedia being woke. I can go on Twitter right now and find several bots talking about how Wikipedia isn't an ideal source of information using the same language and argument you just did.
I appreciate the clarity you provided on what kind of decisions the editors of Wikipedia have to make, but I feel there's likely a better way to phrase it that makes Wikipedia seem stronger rather than weaker because of it.
Can't scientology be both?
Homeopathy doesn't follow the scientific method - its axiomatic. I don't think its hard to dismiss it as a non-science.
Wouldn't better examples of 'taking sides' be like moral panics etc?
Homeopathy presents its approach as if it were science. Pseudoscience clearly fits
Yeah, and it's worth clarifying when we assign controversial labels to topics that we do so only insofar as reliable sources already consistently do so. Even if it's an objective statement like "convicted smuggler", that still needs to be balanced with how much that aspect of the subject's life is covered by reliable, independent sources compared to the others. This is pretty similar to how we would treat a benign, neutral statement: we wouldn't write "John Doe is a businessman, politician, and person whose favorite color is orange" absent comparatively lengthy coverage from multiple outlets about Doe's obsession with the color orange.